Though a playoff breakthrough is now a distinct possibility, a net-ready-to-gloat Bobby Valentine really hasn’t changed, His baseball acumen remains second to none–and so does his proclivity to annoy.

This being his best chance at a finest hour–maybe his last chance, at least with the Mets–you just know Bobby Valentine wants to pounce on the opportunity to stick up for himself. You know that as the Mets make this final push over the next 10 days to win the N.L. East championship or the wildcard playoff berth, a post-season push that looks as if it will be successful, Valentine has the urge to crow a little, even thumb his nose at a critic or two. Or more.

Plenty of those critics would like nothing so much as to see Valentine take the fall for another Mets collapse, another season-ending losing streak like the five-game free fall that cost the team the playoffs a year ago. Valentine, foiled again, took the heat, heard the whispers, saw the knowing nods. And had nothing with which to fight back.

Now, he does. Now, this September, on the verge of the breakthrough, you’d think maybe he’d fire a few volleys, champion his cause. But …

Barry Halper, baseball memorabilia collector extraordinaire, is hoping to swap $30 million to $40 million worth of historic baseball items for a portfolio of boring taxexempt bonds.

What would possess a man to do such a thing?

Estate taxes, that’s what.

The equity stake Mr. Halper, a New York Yankee limited partner, would receive from the baseball team’s proposed merger with basketball’s New Jersey Nets is a no-brainer from an estate planning standpoint: Were he to pass away his family could easily sell part of their 1% share in the team to pay estate taxes.

But Mr. Halper’s memorabilia are another story. Although widely considered the best and biggest baseball-related collection in the world, it (like other collections) is highly illiquid and requires a buyer to determine its value. In other words, the estate taxes on the collection would be a big burden on the family of the 59-year-old Mr. Halper, who has experienced health problems in recent years.

So to save his family from having to justify the value of the collection and find buyers should he die prematurely, he has sold off a big chunk of his collection — it has its own wing in the Baseball Hall …

Sleep is my most favorite part of my day. I work hard and at the end of a busy day I just love crawling into my bed, cuddle up with a nice book or cocoon myself in my blankets if I’m really tired and pass out into dreams of sweet nothing. I’m the kind of person who likes to be warm, comfortable, submerged in darkness and most importantly, I like silence. Sometimes I’ll put on some soft music if I’m having a hard time sleeping or some white noise but there is always one thing that is certain to ruin any chance of sweet dreams: snoring.

Personally, I don’t snore but I have family members who do. It’s the worst thing when you are just about to fall asleep and suddenly you are jolted awake by what sounds like a seal dying. Or a troll throwing up. Honestly, it’s one of the weirdest and most obnoxious sounds ever. In this situation, something needs to be done and that’s when I started looking into anti-snoring mouthpieces.

There are nasal strips and cones as well as chin straps and other interesting devices but for the people I know who snore it is …

So says Dr. Jack Llewellyn, a sports psychologist who tries to get pro athletes to focus not on winning but on doing their best.

You’ve heard the saying, “Winning isn’t everything–it’s the only thing.” Right? While you may agree, Dr. Jack Llewellyn, sports psychologist, disagrees. He believes you should always play to win, but be able to define winning beyond the final score.

He should know. As a sports psychologist, Dr. Llewellyn helps professional athletes–including Atlanta Braves baseball players, tennis players, NFL players, and PGA golfers–deal with winning, losing, and recovering from the ups and downs of professional sports.

Needed: A Winning Attitude

“The key to success is to do what you’re capable of doing–and only you know what that is,” says Dr. Llewellyn.

According to Dr. Llewellyn, attaining athletic success depends on your physical capabilities or talents and on how you use your mental attitude and abilities to supplement that talent.

“Physical talent will take you only so far,” says Dr. Llewellyn. “If you put two equally talented professional athletes together, the mentally stronger of the two will win most every time. In professional sports, especially, everyone has reached about the same physical level. What separates them from each …

Ok, ok, before you freak out, that little bump you just discovered on your skin, albeit scary looking is completely harmless. Skin tags are a normal common part of life, as a matter of fact, just about everyone has at least one skin tag in their lifetime. And unfortunately, some people are more prone to growing skin tags than others. People who have diabetes or are overweight can experience a higher incidence of skin tags. Skin tags like to form in high friction areas of the body. These areas include the armpits, neck folds, eyelids, groin, under the breasts and the buttocks. However, they don’t exclusively form just in those areas, they can appear anywhere on the body. They look like small, ballooned, mushroom pieces of hanging skin.

The ragged edge of the arctic world, far from being desolate, is a place of impressive abundance.

Devon Island’s shape is a “legless donkey with its head thrown up to bray” according to the book Arctic Canada from the Air. Suitably inspired, we set off on the “Legless Donkey World Tour 1998.” We skied in the metaphorical wake of 17th-century Arctic explorers William Baffin and Robert Bylot, slowly at first, being neither in a hurry nor fully acclimatized for the work soon to come our way.

Nine days later, we stood at Belcher Point, beside open water for the first time. Eider ducks swam before us, calling occasionally. Fresh bear tracks reminded us to be alert. The salty smell of the cold sea, the contrast of snow against water, the vast, nameless bay, and the hazy, distant, glacier-draped mountains completely overwhelmed us.

At 55,247 square kilometres, Devon is the world’s largest currently uninhabited island. But there is much evidence of bygone human habitations, although not continuous, from the early paleo-Eskimo period about 4,000 years ago to the Thule culture whale hunters who occupied arctic Canada into the 1600s.

In the year before her death, Rosemary Nelson pleaded for help from several international delegations. Last summer, Toronto lawyer Cindy Wasser saw the piece of paper she carried upon which the death threats were written. But Nelson said her family had urged her to continue her work “She was fearless, brave kind, very much a family-oriented woman, in love with her husband and a great mom,” Wasser said. She also had lived all her life in the midst of “the troubles,” both personal and political. When she was younger, said Wasser, one-half of Nelson’s face was badly scarred from a fire. A measure of the hate directed toward her was that after the blast, several neighbours said: “Oh, that’s just half-face Nelson.”

Around the time Nelson was killed, half a world away, Aung San Suu Kyi was awaiting news of the death of her husband, Michael Aris. An admired professor, he had stayed behind in England when she went home to Burma in 1988. Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma’s (now Myanmar) famous independence leader who was shot dead at 33, has now lived without her husband and two sons for more than a decade.

You had to be there — as a relative or friend of one of the dedicated men and women, aged 18 to 70, who went to the start. There was pro Peter Reid, the angular 31-year-old world champion from Victoria, winning his ninth Ironman title, and $14,000, in a mere eight hours, 27 minutes and 47 seconds. And Gillian Bakker, 31, an engineer from nearby Winfield, B.C., taking the female crown and the same egalitarian $14,000 in 10 hours, four minutes and 27 seconds, despite having to stop twice because of blown tires (Chris later realized he went to high school with her in Toronto). There was Sister Madonna Buder, 70, a Roman Catholic nun and the oldest finisher, who came in to the cheers of the crowd at 9:35 p.m., fully 14 hours and 46 minutes after she started. And in a gutsy performance, Dale T. Buckman of Spokane, Wash., made it to the line just one minute and 25 seconds before the midnight close of the race. In all, 142 entrants, including eight pros, did not finish. There were people running for breast cancer survivors and to raise money for leukemia research and Crohn’s disease. Along the way, …

Cleveland sports fans were up in arms last month about the rating of the country’s top sports cities by The Sporting News, a St. Louis-based national publication that always carried the parenthetical expression “baseball’s bible” after its name. But I’m not one of those who are offended.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of my hometown and its sports teams, but the time I sweat survey results about how well liked or respected my town is by people in other areas passed long ago.

The Sporting News produces this rating annually, and in the past, Cleveland ranked much higher than No. 32. That, of course, begs the question: Why is the methodology and results of the survey held in higher esteem when the results are more to the reader’s liking than they are when the reader’s favorite city is rated low?

These surveys and testimonials from out-of-towners don’t do much for me because the criteria used for such rankings are subjective; and without complete knowledge of the rater’s method for deciding what he or she likes or dislikes, there is little reason to get huffy.

Long-time readers of this column have heard me before on the value of …

As the U.S. wireless data industry extols the benefits of packet-based, always-on networks and faster data rates, as well as the importance of selling to the corporate market, one company is quietly offering just exactly those services to just exactly that market.

Nextel Communications Inc., the upstart U.S. wireless carrier that built its nationwide network using Motorola Inc.’s iDEN technology for specialized mobile radio spectrum, operates an always-on, packet-based network for mainly business users and–probably not coincidentally–sports the highest percentage of data subscribers of any U.S. carrier.

“All of the data they’re providing, with very few exceptions, are business-related applications,” said Andrew Seybold of the Andrew Seybold Group. “So the/re following the model that I believe is the right model.”

Industry analysts say that model, as well as the company’s network technology, has given Nextel the undisputed lead in data services among nationwide voice and data carriers. In the year-and-a-half since the company launched its data services, mobile data subscriber numbers have rocketed from zero to more than 1.5 million. That means about 19 percent of Nextel’s 7.68 million customers subscribe to data services.